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The new film "The Creepy Line" argues that tech giants
sometimes silence conservatives and try to steer America
left.

Leaked emails show some Google engineers blaming
their company for Trump's 2016 win, suggesting that the site should
censor outlets like the Daily Caller and Breitbart. Google says the
company never did that, but for many people, it raises the
question: Could Google executives flip an election? "Google's
senior management was heavily in favor of Hillary Clinton,” The
Creepy Line writer Peter Schweizer tells John Stossel. "Their
ability to manipulate the algorithm is something that they’ve
demonstrated the ability to do in the past ... and the evidence
from academics who monitored 2016 was clearly that they did."
Schweizer's film features psychologist Robert Epstein, whose
research claimed that people rated Google's top search results in
2016 as more positive to Hilary Clinton than to Donald Trump.
Stossel says that it doesn't prove that Google's results were
biased; it may just be that major media outlets ran more positive
headlines about Clinton, and since Google's results rely on the
major media, that would bring more positive Clinton headlines, even
without any bias on Google's part. Even if Google's search
algorithm is fair, major social media outlets do manipulate us by
determining what we can not see. The film plays a clip of
psychologist Jordan Peterson, who points out: "They’re not using
unbiased algorithms to do things like search for unacceptable
content on twitter and on YouTube and on Facebook -- those aren’t
unbiased at all. They’re built specifically to filter out
whatever’s bad." Stossel notes that Google and Facebook employ
human content monitors -- some of whom despise conservatives -- to
determine what is "bad." Peterson himself has reason to worry.
After he criticized a Canadian law that would mandate use of
people's preferred pronouns (like "Ze" or "Xir”), Google briefly
shut down Peterson's Youtube channel. They even blocked him from
his own Gmail account. "That’s a real problem," says Peterson. "You
come to rely on these things and when the plug is pulled suddenly
then that puts a big hole in your life." Stossel wonders: what can
consumers do about possible social media manipulation or
censorship? One speaker in Schweizer’s film says, “delete your
accounts!” Stossel tells Schweizer: "I don’t want to delete my
accounts -- and you can’t, without cutting yourself off from much
of the best of the world." Schweizer admits that it's a challenge,
but says he's switched to Google's competitors. For simple
searches, Schweizer uses DuckDuckGo.com instead of Google. For
email, Schweizer uses the encrypted service ProtonMail.com, based
in Switzerland, rather than Gmail. The web browser "Brave" provides
an alternative to Google's Chrome. Brave was founded by Brendan
Eich, who created the browser Firefox but was then forced to leave
his own company because he once donated to a ballot proposition
against gay marriage. But most people won’t switch. Stossel hasn’t
switched. He wonders if a few individuals switching will change
much. "That’s all we have? A pathetic act that won’t make any
difference?" he asks. Schweizer replies: "If people make clear to
Google that they don’t like their manipulation, and they don’t like
their invasion of privacy ... they will be forced to make changes.
That’s part of the reason we love and support the market the way we
do."

Asian Americans are suing Harvard for illegally
discriminating against them

The lawsuit forced Harvard to release admissions data
which reveal that admitted Asian applicants score 22 points higher
on the SAT than whites and 63 points higher than blacks. Harvard
admits to using race as a factor in admissions for the sake of
diversity. But the school says it does so without any hard quotas
or race-based points system -- that they merely consider it
informally. Past Supreme Courts have allowed that. But the Asians
suing Harvard argue that the university gives them artificially low
personality ratings to keep their admissions rate down. They say
Harvard treats Asian Americans as "boring little grade grubbers."
Harvard's data show that a typical asian applicant is less than
half as likely to get a good personality rating in Harvard's
admissions process than a typical black applicant. Lee Cheng of the
Asian American Legal Foundation says the data show clear,
systematic discrimination based on race. "Harvard didn't just use
race as one of many factors. It was the determinative factor,"
Cheng tells Stossel. Many experts say that Harvard's case may reach
the Supreme Court. If it does, then the court -- with President
Trump's new appointees -- might strike down all college racial
preferences. Ending racial preferences would increase the share of
Asian and white students in colleges, but decrease the share of
black and hispanic students. Harry Holzer, an economist and Harvard
Alum who studies affirmative action, says that would be a big
mistake. "When you have a long history of discrimination based on
race, you have to take race into account," Holzer tells Stossel.
But Cheng says Harvard's preferences don’t help disadvantaged
people. “Race based affirmative action helps rich people ...
Seventy percent of the students of every ethnic group at Harvard
come from the top 20 percent of family income," Cheng tells
Stossel. Holzer responds: "It's okay ... race in America matters at
any level of income." But Cheng responds that when wealthy people
use race to get a leg up, poor whites and poor Asians get hurt. He
first became passionate about racial discrimination when he faced
it in high school. San Francisco had a strict racial quota for
admission to the Lowell public magnet high school. Because there
were many Chinese kids in the area, Cheng and other Chinese
Americans had to score higher than kids of other races. "I was just
shocked," Cheng tells Stossel. "I was just taught in civics and
history that in America everybody was supposed to be equal under
the law." Cheng got in, but he says he saw many of his friends get
left behind because of racial preferences. "The kids who were
negatively affected ... were the kids of the dishwashers and the
seamstresses and who lived in Chinatown, who were very poor." Cheng
eventually sued San Francisco and forced them to end their quotas.
Now he hopes the lawsuit against Harvard will do the same to
universities. "I have three kids," Cheng says. "I'll be damned if
I'm going to not fight very, very hard to make sure that they don't
get treated as second class citizens in the land in which they were
born."

Dozens of news outlets reported that America has the
most mass shooters in the world. Many say that shows America needs
more gun control

CNN claimed that "the U.S. has the most mass
shootings". The WSJ reported that "U.S. leads the world in mass
shootings." Nearly every major media outlet and former President
Obama said the same. But the claim is based on just one study, and
the author of that study, Adam Lankford, would not release his data
to other gun reseachers in the field. Economist John Lott argues
that Lankford's study has many flaws. Lott is the author of the
books “More Guns, Less Crime” and “Bias against Guns.” His son,
Maxim Lott, works for Stossel TV. Stossel says because of that, he
repeatedly asked Lankford to show him the study data that he would
not reveal to Lott. But Lankford would not disclose it to Stossel
either. Lankford claimed to find "complete data" for all mass
shootings in 171 countries from 1966 to 2012. But Lott notes that
Lankford doesn’t reveal basic details about how he found shootings
in so many countries -- most of which don’t speak English. And most
of those years, those countries didn’t have the internet. Lott
argues that finding complete data for mass shooters in just one
developing country, such as India, would be an incredible feat, as
many shootings would be reported only in local outlets in the local
language. U.S. mass shootings, on the other hand, are
well-documented and hard to miss. Lott says that if Lankford missed
foreign cases but found all the U.S. ones, his paper’s entire
conclusion that the US has the most mass shooters could fall apart.
Lankford has declined to answer questions about how he searched for
foreign-language cases. Did Lankford miss foreign cases? Because
Lankford would not release his data, Lott and the think tank he
runs -- the Crime Prevention Research Center -- compiled their own
count of mass shooters. (His paper is at
http://ssrn.com/abstract=3238736 ) Lott counted more than 3,000
cases around the world -- several times more than the 202 cases
Lankford found. Lott found 15 times more, despite the fact that he
only looked for shootings in the last 15 years, whereas Lankford
looked at 46 years. Lott attempted to use the same definition of
"mass shooter" that Lankford used, although that’s difficult. In
Lankford's paper, Lankford says he excludes "sponsored terrorism"
but does not define what he means by that. To be safe, Lott removed
all terrorism cases from his data. When he did that that, he still
found 709 shooters around the world -- more than 3 times what
Lankford found. Gun control advocates have used the Lankford study
to argue that mass shootings are caused by the comparatively high
gun ownership rate in the U.S. But when Lankford's data are fixed,
Lott says, there is no longer any correlation between gun ownership
rate and mass shootings. Lott concludes: "There is a lesson here.
Lankford’s critical but simple error could have been picked up if
journalists had only demanded his data and methods before
publicizing his study.” That’s something journalists rarely do.
Lott adds: "Journalists should learn to be skeptical... and in the
meantime, we should all be skeptical of news coverage of studies
like this -- that simply confirm what journalists and people want
to hear."

Holiday season is here. To help your friends or family
learn about liberty, why not give them a book

John Stossel has some ideas. First, there's The Road to
Serfdom. In it, Friedrich Hayek explains why government
intervention in the economy leads to serfdom. He explains why no
central planner can allocate resources as well as individuals can.
Stossel says this is a great book for your socialist friends -- if
they are willing to read it. They might not be, Stossel says,
because language is old. Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics is more
current. Sowell explains that trade is not a zero-sum game -- it's
not as if one country wins and another loses. Both sides benefit.
Stossel suggests that someone should give Sowell’s book to our
President. Another myth-busting book is The Myth of the Robber
Barons. Historian Burton Folsom explains that Cornelius Vanderbilt
and John D. Rockefeller didn’t get rich by robbing people. They got
rich by creating better things. Another good book that will educate
someone about basic economics is Free to Choose by Milton and Rose
Friedman. Stossel also briefly mentions a bonus book by a former
clueless, lefty, big-government loving reporter who finally woke up
to the benefits of markets. That book is Give Me a Break. Prefer
fiction? Stossel recommends two classics, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn
Rand and Animal Farm by George Orwell. Any of these books, Stossel
says, would make a great Christmas gift.

Companies like Google and Facebook collect information
about us and sell it to advertisers.

The information they collect and the way they collect it
cross the "creepy line” according to a new documentary called "The
Creepy Line.” John Stossel asks the writer of the documentary,
Peter Schweizer: “What’s the big deal? They're giving me
information.” Schweizer responds “to the extent that somebody can
do something for you, they can do something to you.” He goes on to
make a powerful case that Google and Facebook abuse their power.
The documentary says that Google tracks you even when you are not
online. As soon as you connect to the internet, Android uploads to
Google a complete history of where you’ve been that day. Schweizer
wants Google and Facebook to be regulated like media companies.
Stossel is skeptical "You want regulation? That's going to make it
better?” he asks. Schweizer answers: “one of the ways you deal with
Google's market concentration, and its massive control of search
is, put it under the same shackles [as] other media companies.”
Stossel doesn’t presume to know what, if anything, ought to be done
about Google and Facebook. But he says that the documentary makes a
compelling case that these giant companies do creepy
things.

Socialism is now cool in some circles. Newly elected
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praises "Democratic
Socialism" and told comedian Stephen Colbert, "in a modern, moral
and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to
live

Colbert ate it up. "Seems pretty simple!" he
replied, to cheers from his audience. But socialism shouldn't be
cool, Gloria Alvarez reported recently, noting that it wrecks
economies. In this video she points out that it also leads to
government using force against its own citizens. Regimes that call
themselves socialist have killed millions of people. Tens of
millions were killed in the USSR. Same in China. Millions also died
in Cambodia and North Korea, which claimed to follow socialist
ideals. Today’s socialist say that those countries didn't do "real"
socialism. They promise that their experiment will be different,
and better. "Democratic socialists" like Sen. Bernie Sanders and
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez certainly promise to avoid anything like
the horrors of previous self-described socialist governments. But
Alvarez says that socialism, whatever the variant, tends to turn
out the same way. Right now, people die in Latin American countries
that fell for socialism's promises. In Cuba, because government
restricts private property and trade, Cubans trade on the black
market to survive. Sometimes government violently cracks down on
them. Alvarez interviews Ibis Valdes, who says: "my father was a
political prisoner [in Cuba] for almost a decade ... because in his
20s he sold soaps and perfumes and did not want to relinquish all
of his profits to the government." Michel Ibarra, who escaped Cuba,
says: "Socialism is the perfect excuse for someone who wants to
rule an authoritarian regime." Political violence in the name of
socialism also occurred in Nicaragua and Venezuela. Alvarez
interviews Ramón Muchacho, a former mayor of a section of
Venezuela's capital city, Caracas. He tell Alvarez that he was
pressured by socialist leaders to use his police force to brutally
suppress protests against the regime. Because he refused, he was
threatened with jail. He fled to America. "It seems to me we are
not able to learn," Ramón Muchacho tells Alvarez. "[Politicians]
will always be dreaming about the future and never delivering.
People keep falling in love with that kind of crap." Alvarez hopes
that some will learn. Gustavo Tefel, who fled violence in Nicaragua
tells her that he did. "I don’t think [people] realize how deep
socialism is involved in all [the violence]... America is a great
country. People really don't appreciate it much ... they should
travel a little more to poor countries to really get a feeling for
what they have here in the United States. Just look around, you
know, and really get some knowledge."

Our government says e-cigarettes/vaping is the latest
"epidemic" among teens. So the FDA says they will restrict them.
Cities across the country are banning e-cigarette use in
public.

But e-cigarettes help smokers quit traditional
cigarettes. Michelle Minton of the Competitive Enterprise Institute
tells John Stossel that people have misconceptions about
e-cigarettes. “It's about 95% less harmful than a normal
traditional cigarette.” That’s because e-cigarettes let people get
a hit of nicotine without actually burning tobacco. The burning of
paper and tobacco leaves is what makes cigarettes so dangerous.
Minton admits that the nicotine in e-cigarettes is addictive. But
she says, “on the spectrum of drugs that you can become addicted
to, nicotine and caffeine are very similar to each other.” The
Surgeon General says there are other health risks to vaping:
“Besides nicotine, e-cigarettes can contain harmful and potentially
harmful ingredients.” Despite the dangers, researchers seem to
agree that e-cigarettes are substantially less dangerous than
combustible cigarettes. Other studies concluded that long-term
e-cigarette use is “associated with substantially reduced levels of
measured carcinogens and toxicants relative to cigarette-only
smoking.” Nevertheless, the FDA threatens to crack down to
discourage kids from using e-cigarettes. Minton says that is a bad
idea: “Do we want children to become addicted to anything? No ...
But keeping a small percent of teenagers from trying e-cigarettes
is not worth sacrificing adults whose lives could be
saved.”

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